Let ‘non-users’ and ‘near-users’ inspire the best UX design

They had been watching the older man working at his laptop in the coffee shop in West Australia for about three hours. That he had been there that long wasn’t the unusual part.

What was odd, at least to UX designer Steve Baty and his team, was the number of women in their thirties who kept walking up to him, chatting amicably for a few minutes, and then leaving.

“We were thinking, ‘What the hell?’” He’s not that bad looking of a guy, but it’s not like he’s buying them drinks,” Baty, principal at Meld Studios, told the Fluxible conference in Kitchener-Waterloo recently. Eventually, they went up and asked him for an explanation.

“It turned out he was the minister from local United Church,” said Baty. “All the women come to the cafe after they drop their kids off at school, and by being there he’s able to have those conversations he needs to have — How’s your mother’s health doing? What’s going on with that situation with you and your husband? — because they’ll come up to him.”

Meld was researching cafe culture as part of a UX project for a client, but for Baty the incident was instructive on multiple levels. The minister was being smart about not only knowing his “customers” well, but going to places where there were also bound to be plenty of people not traditionally interested in his services.

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Baty suggests that UX designers need to think more carefully not just about their users, but more particularly their “non-users,” the people who deliberately avoid certain experiences and who therefore may be best equipped to offer clues about what needs to change.

“This is often a greater pool of people than our customers,” he said, along with “near-customers” who may try products occasionally but aren’t necessarily very loyal. “If they had a better option, they’d probably bugger off and use it.”

What non-users value

As an example, Baty cited products like the Wii Fit Plus, a device that takes the traditional technology of the video game console but appeal to a much different demographic. For the classic Wii gamers, “it was all about the technology — the sub woofers, things like that. Moms would be disengaged — they were only there because they had to be near their kids. The exercise console was a total different basis of competition.” In that case, there might be poorer graphics and sound, but the way it allowed them to exercise was what held the greatest appeal. “If you see a 70-year-old woman play Wii bowling, you’ll see what a difference this made in their market.”

Other examples include Yellow Tail wine, which Baty said began by researchers surveying people who normally found wine “too snooty, complicated, and who just wanted a drink.”

Then there was Apple’s iMac, a colourful desktop that transcended the beige boxes that were traditionally sold mainly to the education market. “It was meteoric. Apparently people cared about the look of these things,” he said. “Instead of being hidden on the floor they were up there on the desk. People were proud of them.”

Design to fix what non-users hate

To design for non-users or near-users, Baty recommended looking for something that people value but that the industry currently doesn’t offer. He showed a slide of a product that looked like a free-standing cube that runs on tank water and has air-conditioning. These “hyper-cubes” can be dropped into a forest or camping ground and attract those who might enjoy nature but normally prefer a luxury hotel to a regular tent.

“It’s the best-looking tent I’ve ever seen,” he said. “You would never get this thing by talking to people who enjoy camping.”

While working from focus-group research of existing customers or target personas may be relatively easy to build a case for some designs, Baty said designing for non-users or near-users can involve greater risk. He said more UX designers need to steel themselves for rejection and press on anyway.

“It’s easy to make a little step. But if when you put forward an idea and someone isn’t laughing at you, you’re probably not breaking new ground,” he said. “It requires an optimism and a bold ambition.”